More e-books than physical books?

RapidValue

Jul 25, 2010

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Came across this interesting piece of news last week:
“Amazon said, it sold (in last quarter) 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hard-covers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.”

In the industry that we are, this is a significant piece of news – In a very short life-span that e-books have been in existence, they are already outselling physical books. Per Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, Amazon has been selling physical books for 15 years, and e-books for less than 3 years. Also, Kindle has been in existence for a shorter time-frame. Add to this the fact that there are only 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of physical books sold on site, you start to grasp the magnitude of this snippet.

Another of the ways mobile devices will change the world that we live in. Personally, I always thought the iPad was a more powerful and richer reading device, and would love to see the impact there.